Windows/Linux interoperability, sincerely yours

Submitted by Ty on August 8, 2007 - 12:00pm

For all the hot-headed sparring between the Linux and Windows communities, Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s director of technical platform strategy, talks straightforward about wanting Windows/Linux interoperability and appears sincere. Though, admittedly, he was addressing attendees of the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

During a conference session on Tuesday about the upcoming virtualization in Windows Server 2008, Ramji repeatedly promised that engineering work would be done in the open and be continuously sent to the open-source community for feedback. “You can hold Microsoft accountable for that,” he said. Furthermore, he said that all intellectual property developed by the Microsoft/Novell teams around making virtualization work with Xen hypervisors “will land cleanly” in Linux and Xen. What that means, precisely, remains to be seen.